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to sound very Posy Simmonds

Russian translation: (a very English) fun-poking stab at the British middle-class

11:08 Dec 2, 2000

English to Russian translations [PRO]Art/Literary

English term or phrase:to sound very Posy Simmonds

Privet, profi! I`m translating "Poor Souls" by Joseph Connoly (maybe someone knows him?) and now I come across the following: "you sound very Posy Simmonds". P. Simmonds is a prominent comic-writer and was published in the Guardian in the 70's. I`ll give the whole paragraph and if anyone has ideas about what connotations could this lady
have, please share them. In fact, I`m not so much interested in the translation, but in what in the wide world this could mean :-) Here`s the extract:

...They talked about the British Home Stores lighting department at parties, as if it brought them together, and also as a counter to others singing the praises of St Michael apples and knickers and pies. Susan was usually the first to check it, covering her nose with her hand, saying they were sounding very Posy Simmonds, and they had better shut up now. This usually worked, as most people would laugh for reasons of teir own, someone showing off and saying Grauniad. And anyway, Susan asked herself frankly, who had the time these days for papers? .......

And then, any ideas about rendering Grauniad in Russian? (it`s a jocular name for the Guardian, notorious for it`s typos).
Spasibo.

Explanation:I know not one single word of Russian but your question rang a few home bells or two. Mixed metaphors I know. She trained in painting and graphic design and in addition to various publications, she became widely known when she started contributing to the Guardian. Her style is basically (a very English) fun-poking stab at the British middle-class. You should be able to find lots of current info on her in fact as she has just had a new book published.

Here are three samples of what I found on her from a search on GOOGLE.COM

Posy Simmonds began to contribute a weekly satirical comic strip "The Silent Three" to the Guardian newspaper in 1977, some of which have been collected into book–form. She has illustrated a wide–range of books and magazine and newspaper articles. Mrs. Weber's Diary, written and illustrated by her, was published in 1979.

Nicholas Lezard hails a tour de force of bilingual graphic fiction in the form of Posy Simmonds' Gemma Bovery

Saturday October 7, 2000

Gemma Bovery
Posy Simmonds
Jonathan Cape, Ј8.99
Buy it at BOL

This work needs no explanation or apology to readers of this paper, who felt inconsolably bereft when the strip reached an end over a year ago. (For those of you who have been in prison, or joined us recently from another paper or planet, this was about a couple who move to Normandy to escape the rat-race; the woman has an affair and dies. Buy the book and read it. Let's get on.) In its very early days Gemma Bovery had failed to attract me: thin social comment with literary aspirations, I thought, neither a fully fledged cartoon nor a prose work. Too text-heavy for one, too text-light for the other. And what was all that "Bovery" stuff? Can we try not to rely on the classics?
This attitude lasted for about four days. Not only is a cartoon a cartoon - and therefore, apart from the book reviews, the most enjoyable part of any newspaper - but Posy Simmonds is Posy Simmonds. Like everyone else, I began to marvel at ... well, there is rather a lot to marvel at. Like every single drawing, for a start. From the simplest of lines Simmonds can conjure up a world of nuance and even novelistic insight. I do not exaggerate. Gemma's thought-bubble at the bottom of page 65 told me more than I had ever known about the working of a woman's mind in love. But any drawing of Gemma's face tells its own story with clarity and force. The same applies to her husband, Charlie, whose shifts between dreaminess and irritation are equally well captured. Even the minor characters are treated with equal care; Mme Sannier, for instance, with her pop-eyed, provincial, soignй niceness and cretinous conversation ("la reine Mиre - elle a quelle ge maintenant?") - Simmonds gets everyone bang to rights. Her characters have expressions you could write monographs on even when their eyes are represented by nothing more than dots.
But what makes GB so much more than a work of social satire is the way that her graphic line gives everyone, even the most potentially irredeemable, a chance. At the end of page 71, Delphine, Hervй's girlfriend, moves from being a shallowly drawn little BCBG nonentity and, at the moment she discovers Hervй's infidelity, is allowed to become a true portrait. It shows how Simmonds has the ambiguous tenderness of a true creator: almost taken aback by her own skill, one imagines. There is a definite if restrained relish in the way she moves her characters into situations where they can be drawn so well.
There is more than just drawing going on here, of course. There is pacing - GB moves from illustrated text to straight comic strip and back again - and there is the prose, from the narrative frame of Joubert, the nosy, creepy baker (for whom we feel a strange kind of pity), to Gemma's diaries, and down to the speech-bubbles of all the characters. Simmonds has, in this sense, two kinds of blank paper staring at her every morning, and she should be honoured for filling them so perfectly, with such a combination of daring and what looks like effortlessness. That she has to do two nationalities as well - would she perhaps care to make things more difficult for herself next time? And, please, can there be a next time very, very soon? She is the greatest

The Evening Lecture
Posy Simmonds talks about her work..
Posy studied painting in Paris and graphic design at the Central under Ron Sandford. Her early work appeared mainly in children's readers, and then she started her celebrated visualisations of middle class mores in May 1977 in The Guardian - the life and times of the Weber family, with a regular scrutiny of phenomena induced in post-war education.
She has illustrated texts other than her own, ie Daisy Ashford , The Young Visiters. Her characters are ...(list of characters...]

Answers

48 mins

Gemma Bovery

Explanation:Check out Posy's latest in the Guardian, it might give you ideas. I don't follow cartoons, but she seems to have come out with a whole new story line recently.
Something like "Grauniad" would have been unthinkable in the Russia I remember, but I haven't been there since the early 70s, and they very well might have something similar these days (at least in Toronto there are plenty of badly spelled Russian publications.)

Explanation:I know not one single word of Russian but your question rang a few home bells or two. Mixed metaphors I know. She trained in painting and graphic design and in addition to various publications, she became widely known when she started contributing to the Guardian. Her style is basically (a very English) fun-poking stab at the British middle-class. You should be able to find lots of current info on her in fact as she has just had a new book published.

Here are three samples of what I found on her from a search on GOOGLE.COM

Posy Simmonds began to contribute a weekly satirical comic strip "The Silent Three" to the Guardian newspaper in 1977, some of which have been collected into book–form. She has illustrated a wide–range of books and magazine and newspaper articles. Mrs. Weber's Diary, written and illustrated by her, was published in 1979.

Nicholas Lezard hails a tour de force of bilingual graphic fiction in the form of Posy Simmonds' Gemma Bovery

Saturday October 7, 2000

Gemma Bovery
Posy Simmonds
Jonathan Cape, Ј8.99
Buy it at BOL

This work needs no explanation or apology to readers of this paper, who felt inconsolably bereft when the strip reached an end over a year ago. (For those of you who have been in prison, or joined us recently from another paper or planet, this was about a couple who move to Normandy to escape the rat-race; the woman has an affair and dies. Buy the book and read it. Let's get on.) In its very early days Gemma Bovery had failed to attract me: thin social comment with literary aspirations, I thought, neither a fully fledged cartoon nor a prose work. Too text-heavy for one, too text-light for the other. And what was all that "Bovery" stuff? Can we try not to rely on the classics?
This attitude lasted for about four days. Not only is a cartoon a cartoon - and therefore, apart from the book reviews, the most enjoyable part of any newspaper - but Posy Simmonds is Posy Simmonds. Like everyone else, I began to marvel at ... well, there is rather a lot to marvel at. Like every single drawing, for a start. From the simplest of lines Simmonds can conjure up a world of nuance and even novelistic insight. I do not exaggerate. Gemma's thought-bubble at the bottom of page 65 told me more than I had ever known about the working of a woman's mind in love. But any drawing of Gemma's face tells its own story with clarity and force. The same applies to her husband, Charlie, whose shifts between dreaminess and irritation are equally well captured. Even the minor characters are treated with equal care; Mme Sannier, for instance, with her pop-eyed, provincial, soignй niceness and cretinous conversation ("la reine Mиre - elle a quelle ge maintenant?") - Simmonds gets everyone bang to rights. Her characters have expressions you could write monographs on even when their eyes are represented by nothing more than dots.
But what makes GB so much more than a work of social satire is the way that her graphic line gives everyone, even the most potentially irredeemable, a chance. At the end of page 71, Delphine, Hervй's girlfriend, moves from being a shallowly drawn little BCBG nonentity and, at the moment she discovers Hervй's infidelity, is allowed to become a true portrait. It shows how Simmonds has the ambiguous tenderness of a true creator: almost taken aback by her own skill, one imagines. There is a definite if restrained relish in the way she moves her characters into situations where they can be drawn so well.
There is more than just drawing going on here, of course. There is pacing - GB moves from illustrated text to straight comic strip and back again - and there is the prose, from the narrative frame of Joubert, the nosy, creepy baker (for whom we feel a strange kind of pity), to Gemma's diaries, and down to the speech-bubbles of all the characters. Simmonds has, in this sense, two kinds of blank paper staring at her every morning, and she should be honoured for filling them so perfectly, with such a combination of daring and what looks like effortlessness. That she has to do two nationalities as well - would she perhaps care to make things more difficult for herself next time? And, please, can there be a next time very, very soon? She is the greatest

The Evening Lecture
Posy Simmonds talks about her work..
Posy studied painting in Paris and graphic design at the Central under Ron Sandford. Her early work appeared mainly in children's readers, and then she started her celebrated visualisations of middle class mores in May 1977 in The Guardian - the life and times of the Weber family, with a regular scrutiny of phenomena induced in post-war education.
She has illustrated texts other than her own, ie Daisy Ashford , The Young Visiters. Her characters are ...(list of characters...]

1 - British Home Stores (BHS – part of the Conran/Habitat/Burton Group??? I can’t quite remember) is a department store.

Quick (fun cynical) reference to the type of shop these people visit and the type of party conversations they have.

2 – Saint Michael, as any self-respecting British citizen would know, - and now I am playing at Posy Simmonds ! – is the Marks & Spencer’s (M&S)own brand name. Mrs Thatcher used to talk about buying her Saint Michael’s underwear, or ‘knickers’ referred to in your extract.

The whole extract is a parody of the Posy Simmonds’ style. Both laugh at their behaviour, comments etc saying they had better stop, otherwise they would start “sounding like Posy Simmonds”. Fine examples of middle-class Britain, England in particular. The very scene and the fact they refer to Posy Simmonds serves a dual purpose. Not only does it reinforce the image, it confirms that they are the spitting image of the very people PS “uses” as models.

Explanation:...and then a reference:
*Posy Simmonds was best known for satirising the very people who were the Guardian's main readers (White middle class liberals riddled with social angst), as well as taking broader swipes at British society as a whole.
(or smth like that)
As for Graudian, I would just transliterate it and provide an explanation like: "A while ago, the Guardian (which had not long ceased being the Manchester Guardian) was printing in London as well, but was having operational difficulties that meant that, all the text of the paper had to be re-keyed a second time, in a hurry. As a consequence, it became a by-word for typos. One day, they printed their own name as "Grauniad" in a classified ad. Private Eye took this up with amusement and has been
referring to the organ as "Grauniad" ever since".
I would not venture "Огёнонк" or "Коркодил" vs ("Огонёк" "Крокодил"), not only because there was no popular Russian magazine similar to Guardian, but also because the double proof- reading and censorship left no chance for a misprint like that to sneak into an issue.
Sorry for taking up so much space and time.
Regards, Girina

Explanation:This is rendering Grauniad into Russian - a literal rendering. The variants may be different, the only thing that you may need in any case is a brief explanation to give Russian readers an idea why this anagram has a humorous effect.

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